In today’s competitive environment, brands need to be strategic about their website design and have a focused plan of action that consistently engages their target audience. That’s not all. Making sure you have an SEO friendly website design, is the first step you should take if you want to rise above the noise.

Being SEO friendly means that search engines can crawl each page on your website efficiently, interpret the content effectively, and index it’s overall prominence in their database. Here are 6 key elements to take note for creating a website that is designed to rank well.

1. Using Optimised Images

Optimising the text on your website isn’t enough. By optimising the images you’re using, you can increase your website search engine rank. When selecting an image for your website, ensure that images should be 30 to 100kb and have a resolution of 72dpi. To further improve your website SEO, use a keyword in the alt text section of the images and place the images in spaces that are relevant to the website page to positively affect your search.

2. Integrating Social Media

It is essential to use social media because it has the ability to attract your target audience, improve your website’s visibility as well as establish a brand leadership position. Additionally, search engines also value social media, and by adding social media aspects into your website design, your website will rank better. You can do this by embedding social media icons for all of your social media accounts, such as Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook.

3. Considering Website Structure

Beyond thinking about the way a search engine will view your website, you want to make sure you’re building a structure that makes sense for SEO and for your target audience. Creating a site with crawlable link structure is critical to making sure that all of your content is seen by search engines. Some good examples of links that are crawlable are subpages that are not hidden behind submission forms and links within Java content that search engines are able to see.

4. Accessible Design is Key

If your website is difficult to navigate, it will likely rank low with search engines. To ensure that your conversion rates and your ranking with search engines isn’t affected, your website must be viewable on all browsers. You also have to ensure that your website looks correct on all browsers, that it loads properly, and that you don’t use any images that cause your website to load slowly.

5. Responsive Site Speed

One of the ranking factors that search engine algorithms take into account is a fast loading time. If your website takes forever to load, an increase in your bounce rate will be achieved resulting in negative rankings. You can use PageSpeed Insights, a tool to check where you stand and improve your page speed. It can also help to optimise your pictures and script, improving overall website speed.

6. Focus On Indexable Content

One of the biggest challenges of SEO web design is that sometimes the algorithm can’t translate the information inside an image or an animation, even though it may communicate clearly to your website visitor. Here’s how you can ensure that they can be indexed by the search engines:

• Skip using flash animation entirely, since it’s not indexable and not supported on all devices.(Remember, anything that affects speed impedes your search rankings!)
• If you use Javascript, you should use a recommended framework like Brombone or Prerender to optimize it for SEO.
• If your website has videos, fill in all available metadata with your target keyword, including the title and description. Don’t forget to include a transcript on the site too.

Following these 6 tips that are mentioned above is sure to help you set up a basic foundation that ensures your website design is SEO-driven that also boosts conversions.

But you don’t want to just be good, do you? You want to be great, and this is where we come in! With our SEO expertise and decade of website design experience, our team is equipped to take on any web design in the modern era. Contact our sales representative for a quote today!